Trust
by Byakugou
Summary: Papa said he loved them the most, but Maka wondered if it was enough.


**Author's Note: **Wow, it feels like it's been so long since I published any Soul Eater fics, longer than I intended for sure.

I'm kind of testing the waters with this one, I will continue it if there is enough interest from readers, so basically, I need feedback. I don't want to write more for this if I feel it's not going to be worth my while, you know?

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Maka had always been a perceptive child and even at a very young age she knew there was something wrong with her parents. She could say how she knew. It was just a feeling and an awareness that didn't come to her all at once, but in pieces, like the puzzles she spent so much time fitting together, finding just the right piece that matched with another.

Papa was always open and affectionate and treated Maka like she was the most precious thing in the world. He doted on her and indulged her with gifts, and he'd read to her nearly every day from her earliest memories, encouraging her as she learned to read on her own and smiling down on her with love and pride. She'd loved her papa and she had coveted every moment he spent with her with a child's eagerness. That was why she could not help but feel his absence when he would disappear for hours at a time, progressively more often as time went on and without explanation.

"Working," her mother would tell her, but somehow Maka always knew it wasn't true. Maybe it was the way Mama wouldn't look at her when she said it, but instead turned her head away.

She knew her papa's job kept him busy, but Maka also knew he didn't come home from work acting strange and slurring his words or smelling like strong perfume.

Mama and Papa thought she was too young to figure it out, but they were wrong. They didn't realize how much she actually saw.

When she was little, Maka never felt any reason to doubt that her papa loved her. She had been innocent and trusting then, naïve and untarnished by reality and its betrayals. Papa said he loved her and Mama so it had to be true, because Papa didn't lie. And whenever he was around his time and attention revolved around her, so Maka didn't think too much about the times he was gone, at first.

Gradually though, she began to notice things she hadn't before.

Her mother had always been someone who seemed just out of reach, a little larger than life in some ways. Mama was strong, intelligent and beautiful, and a renowned scythe meister the world over – everyone knew of Kami Albarn and her accomplishments. She was everything Maka wanted to be.

However, Maka could feel her mother become more and more distant with each year that passed. She grew cold and withdrawn, like she would rather be somewhere, anywhere, else and Maka soon forgot the feel of her mother's protective arms around her.

She saw her mother became less responsive to her father's displays of affection, tensing when he touched her and quickly brushing him off. When he came to her begging and apologizing, saying he would never do it again and that he loved her more than anything, Mama would glare at him, unmoved. Maka didn't know then, what her father had done, or why her mother refused to forgive him.

The whole thing really didn't make sense to her. What could Papa do that could be so bad? So bad that Mama wouldn't forgive him no matter how many times he said he was sorry. So bad that her mother felt like she had to lie about it to keep Maka from worrying.

The pieces were there, but Maka hadn't figured out how they fit yet.

She heard their fights from her room at night – her mother's yelling and her father's pleading – and Maka would curl tighter into herself under the covers of her bed, just wanting it to stop. Eventually, her father left again and the house fell quiet.

After a little while of laying still in the silence, Maka crawled out of bed and made her way to her parents' room, only to find the door was locked. She pressed her ear to the door, listening for some sound of her mother's presence but hearing nothing. She lifted her small fist to knock and called out to her mother, but got no answer.

Maka was hurt by the rejection she felt, knowing that her mother was choosing to ignore her and angry at her father for whatever he had done to hurt her mother so badly. Disheartened, Maka returned to her room and her bed, where she hid her tears in her pillow, refusing to make a sound.

Being as young as she was though, Maka's anger at her father was quickly forgotten over the next few days when her mother left for an out of town mission and her father returned to showering her with his attention. Maka was excited to have her papa all to herself again and for the first couple of days everything seemed perfect. There was no more yelling and Papa didn't leave to go wherever he went. It was just the two of them.

One day, her father took her out to the bookstore, telling her he would buy her anything she wanted. After Maka found what she wanted, the two of them headed for the checkout. The clerk at the counter was a young woman, about Papa's age, with ringlets of long dark hair and a pretty face.

Standing next to her father, looking up, Maka observed something unusual in the way her papa smiled at the woman and spoke to her, and the way the woman laughed and smiled back at him. For some reason, the whole thing felt wrong to Maka and set off a warning in her head.

"Papa, why did you look at that lady like that?" she said when the left the bookstore. "Aren't you only supposed to look at Mama like that?"

Halting mid step, her father turned his head to look down at her, his expression unabashedly surprised, and then he painted on a smile that she thought looked a lot less happy than the one he'd given the woman in the bookstore.

He crouched down in front of Maka and placed his hands tenderly on her tiny shoulders. "You don't have to worry about that, sweetheart. Papa loves Maka and Mama the most," he said.

She nodded her head, outwardly appeased and the two of them continued down the street towards home. Maka held two of her father's fingers in her small hand, more out of habit than the desire to be near him. Inside, she felt the hurt and anger from before come back and the feelings were much stronger – bitter and heavy and making it hard for her to breathe.

For the first time she could remember, Maka didn't believe her father even though he looked right at her as he said it and gave her that adoring smile of his. He'd said those words so many times and she never doubted them, never questioned them. But now she knew that even though Papa said he loved her and Mama most, he looked at other women in a way Maka thought he only looked at Mama. And she wondered, for the very first time, if he loved them enough.

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It's truly not my intention to vilify Spirit, so I hope I haven't. I actually love Spirit, he is terribly flawed but he tries and I think that he is a good person at the core. What I want to do here is explore the complicated father/daughter relationship of Maka and Spirit, both the bad and the good, but like I said I'm only going to continue if you readers are actually interested. I also need to go back and edit Defensive Wounds, since I've been working with a beta on my Naruto fic and had some bad habits pointed out to me that I want to fix and if I feel motivated then I will work on a second chapter for that.

So, tell me what you think down below :)


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